Daily Archives July 22, 2017

Last Christmas, Nathan Seidle’s wife gave him a second-hand safe she’d found on Craigslist. It was, at first glance, a strange gift. The couple already owned the same model, a $120 SentrySafe combination fire safe they’d bought from Home Depot. But this one, his wife explained, had a particular feature: The original owner had locked it and forgotten the combination. Her challenge to Seidle: Open it.

Seidle isn’t much of a safecracker. But as the founder of the Niwot, Colorado-based company SparkFun, a DIY and open-source hardware supplier, he’s a pretty experienced builder of homemade gadgets, tools, and robots. So over the next four months, he and his SparkFun colleagues set about building a bot that could crack the safe for them...